(04-24-2017, 05:32 PM)Kris Kringle Wrote:

As the days passed, I became strongly concerned that the Committee as a whole was more interested in concluding swiftly with a security threat declaration, rather than properly investigating the situation, and only then making a decision on what our course of action should be. I was strongly and repeatedly opposed to be decision to draft the above statement, insisting that we had a legal duty to further investigate, and to consider any new information that we might have come across.

Our duty is to uphold the security of the region, but not at the expense of due process and always within the constraints of our laws. Maybe they are inconvenient at times, but we have no right to act contrary to them, as the committee did when it decided the investigation conducted prior to the passage of the Security Powers Act was enough to satisfy the legal requirement. That was not fair to ourselves as an institution, to Belschaft as the subject of this investigation, and to the Assembly.

That is why I voted against the statement, and why I continue to oppose the way in which this investigation, or lack thereof, was handled, and believe we should seriously reexamine its validity.

TL;DR I voted against the security threat declaration because I don't believe the Committee conducted a proper investigation, as required by the Security Powers Act.

I want to repeat again that essentially what we committed was a form of double jeopardy. We conducted an investigation, we had extensive discussions in the Assembly and we voted on powers for the CRS. We then, somehow, were expected to conduct a second investigation with new information. 

That's why the Council ultimately threw everything and this kitchen sink into this report. There's only so much information one can gather on one conversation.


Throughout this, some members of the committee continued to maintain that we need a proper investigation, but still can't tell anyone what that is suppose to look like. And, please, if someone else what to explain what a proper investigation should entail — please share, because I'm apparently not understanding this game (literal, not figurative).  

As the discussion has been going on Discord — everyone (including Bel!) — understands why the council would be concerned. The debate is whether or not he's appropriately a member of the nebulous thing called "The Empire," which, unless there's some oath of office, I still can't fully figure out who belongs to it.

Further, this discussion has been going on for over two months now. I think we can also agree this is a ridiculous amount of time for something like this.

As such, here's the point:

We can argue whether or not the conversation and resulting discussions warrant asking Bel to drop endos and lower his profile for a bit. I think we're all in agreement that this can be debated.

However, having this discussion over whether or not we properly "investigated" this is ridiculous because it assumes that either (a) the first release of information from the CRS wasn't an investigation; or (b) that it somehow should have been ignored (by the people who brought it to you) and something else was suppose to pop up.